Transamerica prides itself on truly listening to its customers, which sparks engagement and builds brand loyalty.
“It’s a necessity,” Rich King, Director, Customer Experience, Transamerica – Investments & Retirement Division, told Loyalty360. “If we don’t listen to customers and respond to their changing expectations, we make it too easy for them to go elsewhere to find what they are looking for. It’s understanding who we work for … the customer! It’s the relationship and the sum of all the experiences that a customer has with Transamerica and our brand.”
Customer loyalty for Transamerica means being highly recommended among its customers, distributors, and employees−being a leader in its chosen markets.
“Our President and CEO has challenged each employee,” King said, “to think about how they would finish the following sentence: “My role in serving the customer is…” This perspective helps drive customer experience to every division, every team, and every employee in the company. It is only through this engagement that we can create better outcomes and experiences for our customers.”
Transamerica has had a busy year regarding its customer loyalty initiatives.
Transamerica has launched two programs this year focused on improving and enhancing the customer experience to drive loyalty; a Voice of the Customer platform and Customer Journey Mapping.
“The vision for Transamerica is to establish a unified platform across the enterprise that provides an enhanced view into the customer experience,” King explained. “Voice of the Customer supports our mission to be a customer-centric company by providing a way for us to better understand our customers. It helps us gather 
feedback from our customers through the use of various survey methods. Feedback gathered from the survey offers actionable data and helps us strengthen engagement with customers, employees, and advisors. This approach enables insight-based decisions across every aspect of the Transamerica experience and provides us with a customer net promoter score. With our Voice of the Customer program, we now have a foundation in place to gather valuable customer feedback that we can analyze and act upon to support our effort to put the customer first in all we do.”
Transamerica has also begun focusing on Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) as a means to better understand its customers and identify key components of interaction.
“The result will be a visualization of the end-to-end journey our customers have when dealing with us,” King said. “We focus on the outcomes of interactions at each part of the journey and the emotional responses they provoke. We see our business through the eyes of our customers. And, this is a foundation through which data can be linked (surveys, measurements) and insights can be developed to help drive business improvement activity. Ultimately, it’s about better understanding our customers and putting ourselves in their shoes. We must instill better methodologies and feedback channels to ensure we are connecting with customers in a positive way.”